Boston and the Problem with Collective Guilt

Among the index of absurdities that defined this week were a terrorist act for which no one stepped forward to claim responsibility and a day in which no one seemed willing to take responsibility for the alleged terrorists themselves. Long before the nightmarish saga ended with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in custody, Chechen government officials had rushed to point out that he and his brother had not lived in their country for many years, and that any impetus for them to behave as “bad guys” was rooted in poor parenting and American soil. Two uncles and an aunt distanced themselves from the boys in ways ranging from oblique to prosecutorial. Their estranged uncle, Ruslan Tsarni, denounced them in the most American of vernacular, using the one term perfect for cutting across ideological, ethnic, and social lines: losers. If international terrorism seemed too grandiose a motive for his wayward kin, he neatly dispatched them as something lesser—haters who were unable to “settle themselves” in a new country and therefore struck out at those who had.

There was another, more troubling note. His nephews, Tsarni said, had brought shame upon the family and upon all Chechens. Collective guilt is an idea with fading resonance in this country—a good thing, in balance, however one feels about the reasons. Our bitter partisanship, for example, insures that even our worst civic acts can be attributed to a convenient “they,” not a shame-inducing “we.” And though we think of ourselves as a nation of immigrants, many Americans are removed enough from identity-based communities to recoil at the idea that they’d be held accountable for someone else’s crimes. But recent immigrants know that, even in a country founded upon the premise of individual rights, there is no guarantee that a person will be treated as an individual. This isn’t solely a dynamic about immigration. For those with long enough memories, the ambiguous description of a “dark-skinned male” suspect brought to mind the 1989 Charles Stuart case—itself a case study in collective suspicion and guilt in the city of Boston. Stuart, a white store manager, fatally shot his pregnant wife and placed the blame on an imaginary black assailant. This week, there was not—as there was then—a massive arrest campaign in which race was the only criteria, but there was an immediate reliance upon old suspicions based on religion and ethnicity.

Friday was not the first time I’d heard this sentiment uttered in response to an act of terrorism—nor even the first time I’d heard it said about a Chechen. I was teaching American history in Moscow in 2010 when the subways there were bombed. Even a foreign observer like me could tell that Chechens occupied a precipitous place in the city. They did much of the essential manual labor but were also subject to a kind of casual disregard. Once, when I stopped to admire floral arrangements at a street kiosk, a Russian friend advised me, “These are done by Chechens and they know nothing of beauty.” When I saw a group of young men mock-fighting on a subway platform, someone remarked that Chechens could be expected to behave in such ways. Those sentiments were amplified in the days after the Moscow bombing—in which two rural women were placed in explosive vests, put on subways, and then detonated by remote control—and I heard tales of Muslims refusing to come out in public for fear of retribution. In the wake of decades of struggle with Russia, there was a sense among Chechens in the city that blame for the bombings would be placed collectively upon their shoulders.

The circumstances in Moscow and Boston are very different. Russians and Chechens fought two bitter wars and share a history of hostility that dates back to the Tsarist times. And in the United States, few of us think of Chechens as a distinct group, if we think of them at all. According to the most recent available data, only five hundred and ninety-six people identified themselves as being of North Caucasus origins on the 2000 census. But a casual glance at the front page of the New York Post, not to mention the immediate presumption of guilt directed at a Saudi national, himself a victim of the blast, confirms the bleak logic of Ruslan Tsarni’s thinking. There’s a pragmatic understanding that even if one doesn’t feel guilty for the actions of random individuals with whom you happen to share pigment or faith or language there are surely outsiders who will assign it to you nonetheless.

Perhaps we have little concept of Chechens, but we’ve developed quite a defined concept of Muslims in the past eleven years. One reaction to being asked to think, for the first time, about who Chechens are seems to have been to answer “Muslims” and leave it at that, perhaps with variations like “jihadis” or “Islamic extremists.” In the dizzy aftermath of September 11th, Vladmir Putin even said as much, cozying up to George W. Bush and informing him that his Chechen problem was akin to our Al Qaeda concerns. Viewed through this lens, the actions attributed to the Tsarnaev brothers carry even more weight. A nation that knew next to nothing about Chechens last week might now view them in terms akin to those of a man who prosecuted two brutal wars against them. Every step in the sequence points at something that’s broken. Two bombs went off this week. No one stepped forward to claim responsibility. Ruslan Tsarni worried that his nephews—one deceased, the other in custody—brought shame upon all Chechens. And it’s all Muslims who have reason to fear that they’ll bear the brunt of it.